Friday
17th April 2009: 6.05pm. It's sure been a busy few
weeks - I have been making very good use of my free time now that
lectures are done. I have added a "feed of feeds", the "All
Things Niall Feed" which uses
Yahoo Pipes to
draw together all the feeds from all my websites into one giant
feed. In fact, last entry the feed ripper for this website didn't
work very well - it didn't pass
Atom 1.0
validation but now it does. Indeed, in the process I even wrote
an Atom format RSS output for Plone which was my first publicly
published piece of Zope DTML programming. It's strange really ...
after all the years of refusing to touch web programming because
it's too toy, I must admit that it's finally powerful enough to
merit my bother (though Tn still makes
XML data services, ASPX .NET and even Zope look extremely toy)

The Freeing Growth plan continues apace -
I won't bother repeating here my post about my plans on the Freeing
Growth website - and my activity since I got back from Scotland
has been mostly preparing for my PhD application and also my job
application to the
University of Limerick for a position as a Junior Lecturer.
Scotland was busy but good, saw a fair chunk of people from St.
Andrews just before their term ends, and my next journey outside of
Ireland will be one of a visit to Johanna in Sweden, Nat in Belgium
or Northern England (via Hull). To be honest, it depends entirely on
how the next few months pan out, not least the current likely
exhaustion of cash in September after which myself and Megan will
starve. If welfare let me sign on during the summer months, all will
be well so long as they pay most of the full amount. I'm hoping to
set up a grind school company in addition to the publishing company
aiming to begin trading in September - this should provide much
needed cash flow which is going to be a very serious problem if
welfare drag their heels or refuse to pay (this is quite possible as
I have no social insurance stamps).

My head is pretty spongey so I shall conclude for now - I think
it is a combination of not being used to concentrating for long
periods thanks to falling out of practice due to the previous ten
days of holiday, and also because those ten days were fairly
exhausting and I haven't recovered yet fully. But soon I will - and
then shall come the exams starting early May. Be happy!